Sunday, April 8, 2012

Starmada Sunday: Nova Clarifications / Errata

The MJ12 boards have been busy shipbuilding and theorycrafting, and a few revisions have been made. There were a number of fixes for some of the shipbuilding numbers which are fairly irrelevant to people just using tools to build spreadsheets, but a couple of important player-size clarifications have been made as well:

Long-Range Sensors are going away. The math didn't work on them properly, and they were going to be the next "Just Too Good" thing.

Carronade is going away. There was a fun hack with it that I found where you could use a range 9 carronade on a thrust 6 ship and have it actually cost less than a range 6 weapon, despite being strictly superior. There's no fix except a total rebuild of the ship pricing rules, and since dual-mode weapons can now have different ranges between their modes, its primary intended use in AE is gone. Hence, no more Carronade :(

Double, Triple, and Cata damage have been clarified to not be any more effective against fighters than normal weapons causing the same number of hits (ie, one double damage hit against a fighter flight causes them to be damaged, not destroyed outright). This is analogous to AE impact / damage against fighters. These traits have gained a pricing discount as a result.

Scouts upgraded - If you have one Scout per 400 points of fleet, all enemy ECM values are reduced by 1. This has the potential to reduce Scout's uselessness against a fleet with no Escorts, but is also useless if they have no ECM. Scout ships also become high-priority targets when used in this function, which is nice.

New weapon trait - Pinpoint. Pinpoint weapons ignore the -1 penalty for firing at fighters, drones, mines, and seekers. It's the old anti-fighter trait, basically, but less expensive. Perfect for all your point-defense / CIWS needs.

Mostly, I think these changes are for the better. Carronade will be missed, but Fire Control can help ameliorate its loss. In any case, my spreadsheet has been updated to reflect these rules changes.

Cricket has also relented and created a shipbuilding subforum, so I have yet to determine whether to just post my BFG conversions there and link from here, or to double-post. Remains to be seen.